Saturday, December 21, 2013

What War on Christmas?

I wasn’t
going to post anything about the conservatives’ trumped-up “war on Christmas,”
but after constantly seeing posts and links to articles about this alleged
incursion by my conservative friends on Facebook, I changed my mind. I don’t really have anything new to add
to this fabricated controversy, but I’d just like to go on record saying that
the so-called war on Christmas is bogus and a fraud, and I’m tired of hearing
about it.

The
kernel of this supposed war — I hesitate to call it a controversy, because I
only see one side saying that a controversy exists — has to do with not using
U.S. public schools as bastions of religious proselytizing.Before the civil-rights era, public
schools would often start off the day with a teacher-led prayer, often explicitly
Christian, and sometimes requiring Jewish and other non-Christian students to
stand outside the classroom door if they didn’t want to participate.Since then, the government, which includes the public-school system, has
officially recognized that it shouldn’t be in the religion business.This recognition has led to some controversies regarding what should be
considered an appropriate acknowledgement of faith in the classroom and what
should be considered a case of the government endorsing a religion or belief
system.

Of
course, the predominant religion among U.S. citizens is Christianity, and for
quite some time, Christianity — as the majority-held faith — has enjoyed a
rather privileged status in U.S. society.The most conspicuous example of this is the national holiday of
Christmas, which (as we all know) had its origins as a religious observance.But as America becomes
a more diverse country, more and more Americans are realizing that not all of
their neighbors are Judeo-Christian or celebrate Christmas.And since Christmas is only one week
before New Year’s Day, it’s safer to the sensitivities of non-Christians, and
more inclusive, to say “Happy Holidays.”This is especially true for businesses that don’t want to estrange any
of their non-Christian customers.However, many (most?) Americans still say “Merry Christmas,” a greeting
usually met with a warm response.

Still,
many Christian conservatives like the semi-sanctioned favoritism that the
government bestows on their religion and want to preserve this preferential treatment.Because of this, they want everyone to
know, in no uncertain terms, that the U.S. is celebrating a specifically
Christian holiday every December 25th, and they see any
secularization of the holiday season as an attack on Christianity itself.But what is actually happening is that
Christianity is not as privileged as it used to be, and Christians are
mistaking this lessening of privilege as persecution.

One of
the best-known diatribes against the desanctification of Christmas comes from
commentator Ben Stein.Stein is
Jewish but also a great advocate of the way Christmas is celebrated in the
U.S.He originally made some
statements about the secularization of the holiday in 2005 on a CBS news
program, but his words have since gone viral over the Internet.Part of his presentation went as
follows:

I do not like
getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like
getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God
are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the
concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find
it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.

Stein’s
argument strikes me as disingenuous on several fronts.He talks about Jews, Christians, and
believers in God in general being “pushed around.”This is a very vague phrase that seems to mix together the
suffering of Jews — a truly persecuted people in the history of the West — with
the loss of Christian advantage, but the two aren’t the same.We all know how Jews in the West have
often suffered at the hands of the Christian majority: the ghettoizing, the
banishments, the forced conversions, the pogroms, and its ultimate
manifestation in the Holocaust.I
certainly don’t see anything analogous to these when favoring the greeting “Happy Holidays”
over “Merry Christmas.”

Stein
also conflates atheism, not believing in any gods, with secularism, existing outside the purview of
religion.The U.S. is indeed not “an
explicitly atheist country,” but it does have a secular government that has no
business promoting religion. The whole idea of a secular government is that it won’t advocate any faith.If Christians one day find themselves living in a United
States where Christianity is no longer the religion of the majority, they
wouldn’t want the dominant faith shoved down their throats via the government.The same holds true for minority
religionists living in a Christian-majority U.S. today. Stein’s vague and deceptive
wording alienates me from the rest of his argument, however valid his other
points may (or may not) be.

A cartoon publicized by the Christian organization the Colson Center:If anyone in public education knows of an actual case where a studentwas sent to the principal’s office for saying the word ‘Christmas,’I want to know about it.

Of
course, Stein isn’t the only one to confuse, via faulty reasoning, a loss of privilege with persecution.Former
prosecutor Alan Sears has written an essay that sees the secularization of
Christmas as — you guessed it — an attack on Christianity itself: “More and more, in America, the question of whether it’s
okay to say ‘Merry Christmas’ is becoming, for many, but a cover for the real
question: ‘Is it okay to believe in Jesus Christ?’” And like Stein, Sears offers
unclear arguments to make his far-fetched point.

Saying
that Jesus of Nazareth was “the greatest teacher and philosopher the world has
ever known,” someone who ought to be appreciated even by people who aren’t
Christian (thus making him worthy of a national holiday), Sears writes: “[T]o what aspects of
Jesus’ character and teachings — brotherly love, personal sacrifice,
self-denial, kindness, generosity, concern for the poor, courage in the face of
death, etc. — do groups like the American Civil Liberties Union so
vigorously object?”If they “object” to anything, civil libertarians object to Jesus’ teaching “No one comes to [God] except through
me” (John 14:6) when used in a context that could imply U.S. governmental
endorsement of that belief.That
is a teaching of Jesus that (unlike kindness, generosity, etc.) not everyone
agrees with, and the government ought not to imply that they should.

Sears
also writes:

Mention Muhammad or Hare Krishna [sic] or Buddha or Gandhi in a
classroom, and no one starts calling up lawyers. Carve a quote from any of them
on the courthouse wall, and civil libertarians will sing of your tolerance and
nod in sage approval. No one uses their name in a curse, or shudders to think
someone might really believe what they taught.

However,
the civil libertarians I know would object to words from Muhammad, Krishna, and
Buddha being carved on a courthouse wall just as much as any passage from the
Bible.(Gandhi, on the other hand,
is not a religious figure in the sense that the others are, and his inclusion
in Sears’s list is bewildering.)The government ought not to endorse Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism any
more than it should endorse Judeo-Christianity.So, what Sears says isn’t true.

But the
holiday of Christmas isn’t in danger of going away anytime soon. From everything I see, it will be
celebrated from year to year for the foreseeable future and beyond. What is, however, being lost is
Christianity’s — or at the very least, monotheism’s — special status as
something like a semi-official religion of the United States. And, at the risk of repeating myself once more, a loss
of privilege, by itself, isn’t the same thing as persecution.

The bottom line is that the U.S. government, even in the form of the public-school system, should not be used for Christian proselytizing. However, to many Christians — because they believe that accepting Jesus’ divinity is required for any soul to escape perdition — proselytizing is the best thing that anyone can do, and they see no problem using the government as an agent of religious conversion and propagation. Furthermore, because many of them also believe that government is a “mere” human construct that their God transcends, the idea that government should not be used for religious conversion is not as important as their religion itself, which they see as the one true faith. Sometimes, one tries to appeal to them via Jesus’ Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — and say that just as they would not want a non-Christian government proselytizing them, they should not want a Christian government to proselytize non-Christians. But to be anecdotal, one response that conservative Christians have to this appeal is that, according to Jesus, the Golden Rule is not as important as the commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37). Therefore, they say, converting someone to the Christian faith is more important than treating others as oneself. Also, it’s virtually impossible for them to conceive of a United States where Christianity is not the majority religion. And besides, many of them believe that the world as we know it will come to an end before the U.S. would ever have another dominant faith. In other words, to them, there is no such thing as secularism because everything “falls under the purview” of their religion. So, appeals of this kind to some conservative Christians tend to fall on deaf ears.Given this absolutist mindset among some conservative Christians, expect tocsins of Christian persecution to be sounded anytime an instance of the loss of Christian privilege occurs. Expect the cries of a “war on Christmas” to continue until Doomsday.